Florian Pantazi's blog dedicated to the phenomenon of poverty, from the history of the idea of poverty to the latest policies or initiatives targeting it, with special emphasis on Western and South American developments

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Poverty is back

From a mass phenomenon 200 years ago, poverty has become a fringe one by the 1970’s, when it still affected between 10 percent (Western Europe) and 15 percent (USA) of the rich countries’ population. Since 2000, emerging countries like China, Brazil and others have succeeded, through resolute government action, in lifting an additional billion people out of extreme poverty. The global financial crisis (2007), however, and harsh austerity policies have been responsible for rekindling the specter of poverty in Western Europe.

On the 8th of January 2014, the United States celebrated the 50th anniversary of Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty. This had contributed to transforming America from a powerful nation – economically and militarily – into a great nation, by inaugurating assistance programs targeted at the alleviation of poverty. They are credited with having offered new opportunities for a better life to millions of underprivileged Americans.

Alas, in both the US and Europe, fighting poverty does not meet with the approval of the society as a whole. This is the sad legacy of the founders of Economics. Indeed, Adam Smith, David Ricardo and especially Thomas Malthus, collectively regarded assistance programs to the poor as dangerous and unnecessary, and actively lobbied for their suspension. These days, as Paul Krugman rightly notes in a recent NYT editorial on the issue, LBJ’s war on poverty has become the Republicans’ war over poverty, which is being fought using the same arguments employed at the beginning of the industrial revolution: poverty is the fault of the poor, the poor are lazy and refuse to work, assistance programs are useless, wasteful, immoral, and only contribute to perpetuating poverty, etc.

These are but a few topics I will be dealing with on this blog, the historical flashbacks being completed by the latest data concerning the re-emergence of poverty in Western societies over the past decade.